What is the role of the senses in how we understand the world? Cognitive sociology has long addressed the way we perceive or imagine boundaries in our ordinary lives, but this book pushes this ...
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What is the role of the senses in how we understand the world? Cognitive sociology has long addressed the way we perceive or imagine boundaries in our ordinary lives, but this book pushes this question further still. How, it asks, did we come to blind ourselves to sex sameness? Drawing on more than sixty interviews with two decidedly different populations—the blind and the transgendered—it answers provocative questions about the relationships between sex differences, biology, and visual perception. Both groups speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant visual conceptions of sex, allowing the author to examine the visual construction of the sexed body and highlighting the processes of social perception underlying our everyday experience of male and female bodies. The result is a notable contribution to the sociologies of gender, culture, and cognition that will revolutionize the way we think about sex.Less

Blind to Sameness : Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies

Asia Friedman

Published in print: 2013-07-15

What is the role of the senses in how we understand the world? Cognitive sociology has long addressed the way we perceive or imagine boundaries in our ordinary lives, but this book pushes this question further still. How, it asks, did we come to blind ourselves to sex sameness? Drawing on more than sixty interviews with two decidedly different populations—the blind and the transgendered—it answers provocative questions about the relationships between sex differences, biology, and visual perception. Both groups speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant visual conceptions of sex, allowing the author to examine the visual construction of the sexed body and highlighting the processes of social perception underlying our everyday experience of male and female bodies. The result is a notable contribution to the sociologies of gender, culture, and cognition that will revolutionize the way we think about sex.

Drawing on an ethnography of lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) residents in Ithaca, New York; San Luis Obispo, California; Greenfield, Massachusetts; and Portland, Maine; How Places Make Us shows ...
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Drawing on an ethnography of lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) residents in Ithaca, New York; San Luis Obispo, California; Greenfield, Massachusetts; and Portland, Maine; How Places Make Us shows how LBQ migrants craft a unique sense of self that corresponds to their new homes. The book demonstrates that sexual identities are responsive to city ecology. Despite the fact that the LBQ residents of all four cities share many demographic and cultural traits, their approaches to sexual identity politics and to ties with other LBQ individuals and heterosexual residents vary markedly by where they live. Subtly distinct local ecologies shape what it feels like to be a sexual minority, including the degree to which one feels accepted, how many other LBQ individuals one encounters in daily life, and how often a city declares its embrace of difference. In short, city ecology shapes how one “does” LBQ in a specific place. Ultimately, the book reveals that there isn’t one general way of approaching sexual identity because humans are not only social, but fundamentally local creatures. Places make us much more than we might think.Less

How Places Make Us : Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities

Japonica Brown-Saracino

Published in print: 2017-12-13

Drawing on an ethnography of lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) residents in Ithaca, New York; San Luis Obispo, California; Greenfield, Massachusetts; and Portland, Maine; How Places Make Us shows how LBQ migrants craft a unique sense of self that corresponds to their new homes. The book demonstrates that sexual identities are responsive to city ecology. Despite the fact that the LBQ residents of all four cities share many demographic and cultural traits, their approaches to sexual identity politics and to ties with other LBQ individuals and heterosexual residents vary markedly by where they live. Subtly distinct local ecologies shape what it feels like to be a sexual minority, including the degree to which one feels accepted, how many other LBQ individuals one encounters in daily life, and how often a city declares its embrace of difference. In short, city ecology shapes how one “does” LBQ in a specific place. Ultimately, the book reveals that there isn’t one general way of approaching sexual identity because humans are not only social, but fundamentally local creatures. Places make us much more than we might think.

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